Iterate through the fields of a struct in Go

After you've retrieved the reflect.Value of the field by using Field(i) you can get a interface value from it by calling Interface(). Said interface value then represents the value of the field.

There is no function to convert the value of the field to a concrete type as there are, as you may know, no generics in go. Thus, there is no function with the signature GetValue() T with T being the type of that field (which changes of course, depending on the field).

The closest you can achieve in go is GetValue() interface{} and this is exactly what reflect.Value.Interface() offers.

The following code illustrates how to get the values of each exported field in a struct using reflection (play):

import (
    "fmt"
    "reflect"
)

func main() {
    x := struct{Foo string; Bar int }{"foo", 2}

    v := reflect.ValueOf(x)

    values := make([]interface{}, v.NumField())

    for i := 0; i < v.NumField(); i++ {
        values[i] = v.Field(i).Interface()
    }

    fmt.Println(values)
}

If you want to Iterate through the Fields and Values of a struct then you can use the below Go code as a reference.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "reflect"
)

type Student struct {
    Fname  string
    Lname  string
    City   string
    Mobile int64
}

func main() {
    s := Student{"Chetan", "Kumar", "Bangalore", 7777777777}
    v := reflect.ValueOf(s)
    typeOfS := v.Type()

    for i := 0; i< v.NumField(); i++ {
        fmt.Printf("Field: %s\tValue: %v\n", typeOfS.Field(i).Name, v.Field(i).Interface())
    }
}

Run in playground

Note: If the Fields in your struct are not exported then the v.Field(i).Interface() will give panic panic: reflect.Value.Interface: cannot return value obtained from unexported field or method.

Go 1.17 (Q3 2021) should add a new option, through commit 009bfea and CL 281233, fixing issue 42782.

reflect: add VisibleFields function

When writing code that reflects over a struct type, it's a common requirement to know the full set of struct fields, including fields available due to embedding of anonymous members while excluding fields that are erased because they're at the same level as another field with the same name.

The logic to do this is not that complex, but it's a little subtle and easy to get wrong.

This CL adds a new reflect.VisibleFields() function to the reflect package that returns the full set of effective fields that apply in a given struct type.

fields := reflect.VisibleFields(typ)
for j, field := range fields {
    ...
}

Example,

type employeeDetails struct {
    id          int16
    name        string
    designation string
}
func structIterator() {
    fields := reflect.VisibleFields(reflect.TypeOf(struct{ employeeDetails }{}))
    for _, field := range fields {
        fmt.Printf("Key: %s\tType: %s\n", field.Name, field.Type)
    }
}